White Horse Pilgrim

Fiddler's Green

I've been away at the place where some of us play music and sing. 

I joined the Friday night session, which is smaller. That way it's easier for someone less experienced, such as me, to get in a bit of practice performing.

There are a fair number of folk songs that involve horses and the people around then. Ghost Riders is performed most times we gather, and I have sung Jack Gladstone's Valley of the Little Big Horn a couple of times since learning it. 

As usual the music went on late. This time we were up until 4am. In a fabled past sessions went on to dawn. But the stamina of youth now eludes us. I awoke at 8am after far too little sleep. When I was younger I did a lot of travelling, but this is now the only place where I get to sleep in a dormitory. So I drifted into wakefulness accompanied by gentle snoring and a mixed smell of winter mustiness and warm bodies. And I thought of coffee, which was quick to brew. 

I brought a new song to the gathering - Fiddler's Green. It isn't the nautical song of that name, but another which has come to memorialise fallen cavalrymen. It's not difficult to play and sing, which is good for me. And it's not well known, so I have bagged it as a repertoire piece in that company. 

Fiddler's Green originated as a poem. Sung, is slow and haunting. It makes me think, for I have ridden across places where cavalry fought within living memory. Not the US Cavalry, of course, but that which fought on both sides of the Eastern Front in the Second World War. I came across a Romanian cavalryman who had ridden nearly to the Caspian Sea, on the marches of Persia. Few of those men, or their horses, returned. 

Here are the words: 

FIDDLERS’ GREEN

Halfway down the trail to Hell,
In a shady meadow green
Are the Souls of all dead troopers camped,
Near a good old-time canteen.
And this eternal resting place
Is known as Fiddlers' Green.

Marching past, straight through to Hell
The Infantry are seen.
Accompanied by the Engineers,
Artillery and Marines,
For none but shades of Cavalrymen
Dismount at Fiddlers' Green.

Though some go curving down the trail
To seek a warmer scene.
No trooper ever gets to Hell
Ere he's emptied his canteen.
And so rides back to drink again
With friends at Fiddlers' Green.

And so when man and horse go down
Beneath a saber keen,
Or in a roaring charge of fierce melee
You stop a bullet clean,
And enemies come to get your scalp,
Just empty your canteen,
And put your pistol to your head
And go to Fiddlers' Green.

To the folk festival, and back

On Friday I packed an old rucksack with all the things that I would need during a weekend away:
tent;
sleeping bag; 
a gallon of cider;
half a gallon of wine;
enough food;
my old petrol stove; and
Miklos Banffy's Transylvanian Trilogy to read.

On my head I put an old green Transylvanian forester's trilby hat with a feather tucked into the band - a festival hat.

My rucksack was very heavy as I trudged a long hard mile to the station.

An eccentric old man with a bushy grey beard, who drives a car with one door a different colour to the remainder, spoke kindly to me in the street. Judging by my appearance the hobo community was ready to take me in.

A glass of traditional ale (from the White Horse Brewery, no less) on the train banished my thirst and left me mellow to get into a festival spirit, listening to the Byrds and the Beatles on my iPod.

Not long after getting down from the train I had my tent set up, dinner cooking on the stove, and a mug of old English cider in my hand.

Here's the view from my tent.

 
This is very much a "by invitation" festival, therefore friendly and uncrowded. Everyone present knows at least a proportion of the other visitors. There are no "problems" and nothing illegal happens.

There was plenty of music right through into the early hours of the morning, much of it from the '60s and '70s, with some more recent compositions too. The old favourites appeared for us to sing along to, not forgetting House of the Rising Sun and Country Road.

In the night I sat by the fire drinking cider with the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, an accomplished anthropologist, musician and author. It was such an interesting talk that only when the growing drizzle became rain proper did we notice the downpour and take cover.

 

 At the end of the rented farm field stood a peculiar relic. It's an old shepherd's wagon. These boxes on iron wheels were towed out to the pastures where sheep grazed, providing summer quarters for the shepherd.

Twenty years ago there was still a shepherd on these, however he lived in a cottage and drove out to his flocks. I wonder when those wheeled boxed of corrugated iron and timber were used last for their intended purpose? My guess would be the 1950s.

 
The weekend passed quickly. Too soon the sea of music and merriment vast me up on the shore of the outside world, tired but full of memories.

The cider and wine had all been consumed, and so had much of the food.

In between music I had devoured another great chunk of the Transylvanian Trilogy, transported back a hundred years to a land of deep forests and deeper intrigue, of introspection lacking prescience of the impending storm. I learnt too about places that I used to drive past unware of their history. Better to read now rather than have driven about knowing and therefore lamenting daily that which was lost for no gain.

Best for now to enjoy the beauty of the music, the goodness of companions and old friends, and the rare opportunity simply to sit and read.

Then Danielle brought me back by car, in time to visit and ride my Slovenian mare, a visitor from yet another erstwhile Habsburg land. History, it seems, is one thing that I cannot escape.

Through choice

As we all become old
It's through choice that we become wise.

Today the postman brought me Jack Gladstone's Buffalo Cafe CD. This is rare territory for me, a collection of rather provocative (in a political sense) songs by a Blackfoot Native American. Gladstone's work I encountered thanks to my ex-wife (a part-blood Blackfoot), one of a few enduring benefits from that difficult relationship and not the greatest amongst them. Years ago I had this CD, then it vanished - whether she took it or a Transylvanian employee I do not know - music and words circulating in the recesses of my mind.

That CD has come at a strange time, in a week when I dispatched a dark relic of Transylvania - a folk blouse decorated with Nazi symbols - to a museum of the Holocaust. Odd, isn't it, that Native Americans were displaced and slaughtered in order to create living space for the white master race. Then, a few decades later, Hitler and his acolytes desired living space too - lebensraum on the plains beyond their crowded land - and this time it was wrong. 

It's through choice that we become wise.

I struggled to live in a place darkened by the murder of three dozen Jews where their race was a relative newcomer to that deep far valley. I wonder how dark it must be to live where thousands were exterminated whose heritage encompassed millennia?

But, oh, now it's all been explained to me by a Pentecostal pastor. Native Americans were "pagans" so they received their just deserts. As usual fundamentalism has a glib answer merciless in its condemnation. (To that pastor: it's thanks to your sort that I turned my back on neo-Protestantism over a decade ago. Your breed gave me a clear sign.)

Timeless horizons

The weekend transported me fifty miles and over a decade in time. There was welcome talk with friends unseen since before my precipitous departure to a remote Carpathian glen. Then it was time for that timeless tramp through the woods crowning the chalk ridge of the North Downs, onward and down the dip slope to Tanners Hatch.

That place is a medieval cottage, a building whose written records go back to the 14th century when the place was old enough to require timber for repair, and now a youth hostel quite unlike any other. Long has there been a tradition of folk music events at Tanners Hatch, once monthly and now thrice a year.

Several dozen gathered, most regular visitors, many musicians, a few like me there to listen for my gift lies with crafting tales rather than making music. And how I love to listen to such a variety of songs, the oldest from the great days of the 1960s, others written more recently. Often the audience joined in, and what fun it was to sing along to Take me home, country road in the early hours of the morning. For Tanners Hatch is like a home from home, familiar, secure, where one can stay with friends and fellow travellers. Yet my absence had extended for twelve long years.

We have less stamina now, and music sessions but rarely last until the dawn as once they did. But still I did well to last until the 3am close, buoyed by music and song, companionship and half a gallon of Upton cider. The afternoon I spent catching up on sleep, even as Danielle slept to overcome the ill-effects of jet-lag. For this morning she returned from a family visit to Pennsylvania, happy to be home again here but sorely sleep-deprived.

A week of holiday is over, and it is back to work on the morn. It has been a fruitful week, filled with healing and writing, riding and relaxing. This breathing space enabled fresh strength to be drawn, and now beckoning work seems as a challenge to rise towards.

There is something that I have noticed when riding, that as I become more confident and gifted with fluency so I look further, even to the very horizon. So with riding and so with life itself, and the minute details are still there but cease to dominate. And seeing that great wide vista, whether the landscape or the big picture of work, I feel both enriched and empowered.